Polly Steele

Director/Writer

Polly is an award winning UK based, independent, film-maker renowned for her ability to tell the most compelling and sensitive stories.

She has made films for all of the UK’s major broadcasters, and produced/developed fiction as MD for Rocket Pictures with Elton John and David Furnish and for her own company In Trust Films.

She wrote and directed Let Me Go starring Juliet Stevenson and Lucy Boynton, with Radiohead’s Philip Selway composing. It was selected to premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 2017 and was released in the UK in September through Evolutionary Films. It has won several awards and is now to be distributed worldwide by Red Arrow Int.

Her next feature film is the screen adaptation of Four Letters of Love by Niall Williams which is a best selling Picador classic. Niall has adapted the book with Polly directing. Mark Rylance is attached as the lead and Kevin Loader is producing.

She was commissioned by Good Films to write a full length screenplay entitled The F**K it Button and is currently developing a TV drama (The Life Cycle of a Woman) with Stella Duffy (novelist and playwright) and Tena Sticivic (National Theatre playwright)

Documentary directing work has included BAFTA award winning:

Video Diaries (BBC),Tantrums & Tiaras the inside story of Elton John’s life, shortlisted for a BAFTA(ITV), Kofi Annan – The Eye of the Storm (BBC2), Extraordinary People – the Worlds Youngest Surgeon ,shortlisted for the Grierson Award(five), In the Arctic with Ewan McGregor, (best Indie Documentary), Eastside Story, a revealing portrait of Ray Lewis’s controversial Eastside Youth Leaders Academy (Current TV and Festivals) and most recently a film for BBC2 on Russians in London.

She has also worked extensively for the Elton John Aids Foundation making films with Elton to support their work all over the world.

As a feature producer she was a co-founder of Elton John’s Rocket Pictures where she produced Women Talking Dirty starring Gina McKee and Helena Bonham-Carter and also began to develop animation blockbuster Gnomeo & Juliet, along with a slate of other films.

As a visual artist, May 2012 saw a major exhibition of Polly’s video portraits commissioned for the opening of London’s newest Mint hotel. Her subjects included Tony Benn, Jason Isaacs and star of The Wire, Michael K Williams.